With Intent to Kill

Even with actors like Karl Malden and Paul Sorvino this is a dismal attempt.

It basically adds up to a sales pitch for the psychiatric drug Lithium. Every ten minutes the Holly Hunter character repeats that the kid who killed her sister is on Lithium, so he is incapable of violence.

This piece of crap would get the approval of the drug company that makes Lithium, but the movie stinks.

Everyone except the kid who killed the girl is painted as a villain. What a screwed up attempt by whoever wrote the script for this lame pitch for psychiatric drugs.

This TVM features an early lead role for Holly Hunter as the younger sister of a schoolgirl who has been killed, and the daughter of Karl Malden who has mythologised his late daughter into being a "perfect princess". The home movie we see him watching of them together has the queasy suggestion of overcompensation for Malden's deceased wife. The past is revisited in the form of the return of the boy to town believed to be responsible, released from the asylum he had been sent to since his conviction has been set aside on the basis of "insanity". It seems lithium brings em home. While writer/director Mike Robe errs in the use of a maudlin and reductive music score, what moves the narrative along is the exploration of a crime involving primal motives, and his 3 act dramatic structure. Malden's relationship with Hunter has a Shakespearian resonance - the surviving daughter as disappointment - and Robe brilliantly exploits Hunter's resemblance to her sister to perversely repeat the identity-destroying dilemma in another relationship. Of course, anyone that doesn't appreciate Holly Hunter as an individual we know to be a fool, even when Robe presents her unflatteringly in comparison to the princess. Hunter plays what might be seen as a moment of character triumphant revenge as a moment of pain, and she holds her own with veterans like Malden and Shirley Knight as the boy's mother. Robe also does well with Alex McArthur (from Madonna's Papa Don't Preach music video) as the boy, Paul Sorvino as his father though it isn't much of a role, and even William Devane as Hunter's boss. The scene where the amnesia is broken and the death is dramatised from memory uses the cliched standard I-can-see-what-I-didn't-see-originally, with Robe's clumsy use of the deceased girl's realtime stand-in, and the end is ambiguous and unsatisfying, but he pauses effectively from an objective fired gun, the audience not knowing who has been shot.

With Intent to Kill seems to have taken some inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Spellbound. Young Alex MacArthur is acquitted of murder by reason of temporary insanity, but he serves a stretch in a mental institution. He can't remember the details of the crime, only that he followed his girl friend Catherine Mary Stuart to a lover's lane on top of a dam with another kid, Timothy Patrick Murphy. He chases Murphy away and starts to confront Stuart. The next thing he knows is the girl goes over the dam and he can't remember what transpired. Oh, and he's now on lithium and doing much better though the past gets a little fuzzy at times.

Of course father Karl Malden doesn't think that the punishment was sufficient enough. But wouldn't you know it, who emerges as young MacArthur's champion is Holly Hunter in one of her earliest roles who is the younger daughter of Malden.

If that all doesn't sound too ridiculous, be prepared for what follows in this most trashy made for TV film. Other players like Paul Sorvino and Shirley Knight as MacArthur's parents and William Devane as the editor of the local newspaper where Hunter is doing an internship just mouth the words and look embarrassed.

This cheap ripoff of Spellbound was inflicted on the public by CBS as a made for television release. I'll bet Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck never got anything as shoddy as this offered to them.

I came across this once on British TV, way back in 1989 and although it was just a fairly run-of-the-mill TV Movie, for some reason the memory of it stayed with me so I recently sought out a copy of it and gave it a re-watch.

Sure, it's a bit cliched and contrived in places, but overall it's a decent, very watchable story that covers numerous themes including justice, forgiveness (and lack of it), class, prejudice, abuse of authority, the power of the press, impartiality, second child inferiority complex and the parental fixation that no one can ever be a good enough suitor for their child.

Handsome young football team captain Bo Reinecker (Alex McArthur) was incarcerated in a mental institution for causing the death of his cheerleader girlfriend Lisa Nolen, but four years later he is now out and returning to his home town of Bannon to try and piece things together as his memory of the incident is lacking due to a blow he received to the head in the struggle.

Of course, his return gets under the skin of Lisa's embittered father, Thomas (Karl Malden), an influential figure in the town as he runs the local bank. The Reinecker family, who operate a humble haulage company in the town, have carried the stigma of Bo's guilt and are at breaking point - physically, mentally and financially. But now Bo's return is ramping up the pressure on them.

Caught in the middle is Thomas Nolen's surviving daughter Wynn (Holly Hunter), now trying to establish herself as a journalist in the town's newspaper. Whilst her father expects her to respect Lisa's memory and support him in using her influence to get Bo taken back into custody, she knows she has the professional responsibility to remain impartial. Yet Wynn also remembers when she, like all the other young girls in Bannon, was attracted to the rugged young football captain and those feelings have not entirely deserted her.

Although far from being an A-list movie, decent performances, strongly-defined characters and a plot that unfolds well with one or two unexpected twists along the way, make this a perfectly watchable drama.